Company
Date Published
Author
Joey Bartolomeo
Word count
1065
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Japan's space agency, JAXA, achieved a historic milestone on January 19, 2024, by becoming the fifth country to land a spacecraft on the moon, with its SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) successfully achieving a pinpoint landing within 100 meters of its target. This operation was closely monitored in real-time using Grafana dashboards, which tracked critical functions such as navigation, heater status, and landing maneuvers. At GrafanaCON 2024, Satoshi Nakahira, an associate senior researcher at JAXA's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), highlighted the significant role Grafana played in providing enhanced observability and visualization capabilities. The agency used InfluxDB as a data source and an API for image calculations, which were integrated into more than 10 Grafana dashboards to monitor SLIM's various subsystems during different phases of the mission. Grafana's features, such as variable capabilities, allowed JAXA to efficiently manage and display extensive telemetry data, facilitating a successful lunar landing. The dashboards created were not only instrumental in the control room but were also live-streamed on YouTube for public viewing, showcasing their real-time application during the mission.